It feels like open world games have been having a bit of an extended, existential crisis these past few years. Like there’s a sense that something within the classic formula of big maps, question marks and to-be-coloured-in icons that’s served us so well, back through The Witcher 3 and Skyrim to at least The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, isn’t quite working. That a change or evolution – if not outright ripping-up revolution – of some kind is necessary for the genre to thrive. But also, a bit of a problem: that the games wrestling with these bold new frontiers of mapmaking don’t know what that new, evolved form ought to be.
I’m choosing to place the blame for this squarely with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game so momentously influential in its design that it’s really a cliché now to even mention it. But mention it I must! Because as we all remember, Breath of the Wild was the first big-budget, third-person, open world action game in the post-Skyrim landscape to come out and do something properly different with its structure – and succeed in doing so. It did this by shedding systems of incrementally ever-increasing gear numbers for tiers of self-destructing twigs, and dropping the mass of map icons so heavily relied on by most of its contemporaries for something less prescriptive, more topographical. A map that drew your eye with its contoured details and curious formations, rather than literal waypoints, for an approach that we all decided in joyous union was much more artful.
And from there it all got a bit messy. Open-worlders took different stabs at borrowing from Zelda, more often than not landing somewhat strangely on including a paraglider, of all things. No game summarised this more aptly than Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, the last full-sized Assassin’s Creed offering from Ubisoft and in some ways perhaps also the strangest. Valhalla’s approach to maps and discovery baffled and fascinated: beginning as a fogged-out wash of south-easterly English parchment, gradually this map unveiled its alternative to the Big Question Mark problem. We can’t just stick a load of mystery boxes on there anymore, I’m assuming the discussion went, because it’s all a bit too low-brow – so what do we do? Well, we keep them on there but replace them with glowing dots instead: silver for, erm, something, and gold for when there’s rare loot.
The result was a little murky, an actually quite fascinating idea, blending two almost diametrically opposed approaches to discovery into one – the icon-and-question-mark maximalism of prior Assassin’s Creeds such as Odyssey with the wistful minimalism of Zelda – into something that ultimately landed on neither the former’s convenience nor the latter’s romance. So many games in this loosely post-Skyrim period have got themselves into such a tizz over how they implement their open worlds, as they’ve found themselves in everything from Halo and Gears of War to God of War and Call of Duty. So many more have become even more puzzled by Breath of the Wild, and this endless struggle between a will to make things painless for a player and, I’ve always suspected, a nagging belief that actually, getting your players to think about things actively might be best. Ubisoft, so brutally maligned for its commitment to a very specific, aptly ubiquitous open-world structure of tower-climbing and icon-revealing, has arguably suffered the most, caught in this tangle of opposing ideas and lost identities as a result.